The Buesching mastodon’s story is imprinted in his ivory

about what is truly the first trace of life on Earth. But to say that living things have been around since about 4bn years ago will do as a nice, round estimate. Ever since then, the winnowing of natural selection has done its work. Only the strong have survived long enough to deliver their genes to the next generation. And boy, was this guy strong. Two tonnes of rippling muscle draped over a skeleton weighing the same, all powered by another four tonnes of visceral organs. And tusks. Two enormous tusks, each three metres long and weighing 40kg.It is those tusks that best tell the Buesching mastodon’s tale. More than 13 millennia after his last, fateful encounter with another bull—one that proved stronger, or cleverer, or just luckier—they were discovered, along with the rest of his almost complete skeleton, in peat workings near Fort Wayne, Indiana, owned by a family called Buesching. That was in 1998. Joshua Miller of the University of Cincinnati and Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan have since been studying them, and have published what amounts to a biography of the animal in the .